Collateral Damage

The COVID-19 pandemic is a very rare case of Republican sociopaths actually being personally and adversely affected by being high on their own supply of arrant bullshit. And not just individually in the wave of infections but more broadly in that the total bungling of COVID-response (both the failure to suppress the virus and the failure to pass a second relief bill) make them much less likely to hold the White House and Senate than they would be otherwise.

But we still have to remember how many people Republicans are bringing down with them. The failed response to the pandemic speaks for itself, and the same is true of the sociopaths hugging each other without a mask because they got a new neoconfederate hack to nominate to the Supreme Court:

A widening coronavirus outbreak at the White House has left members of the media scrambling to find out if they, too, are infected.Three journalists who work at the White House tested positive on Friday, according to a series of memos from the White House Correspondents Association.”Given these positive cases, the president’s diagnosis and positive cases among other members of the White House staff, a number of White House journalists are self-isolating pending diagnostic testing,” the correspondents association said in a email to members Friday night. A White House staffer who sits in the “lower press” area of the West Wing also received a confirmed positive result on Friday morning.

And this goes much further:

Others will get COVID from these assholes. Drivers. Waitstaff. Security. We won’t know their names. They won’t get the care Trump and Conway do. Some will pass it to their families. People will die. All because Trump decided it’s a liability to acknowledge that this is real.— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) October 3, 2020

Which, of course, is why framing mask-wearing and social distancing as matters of personal freedom is so stupid.